From Dave Winer: The New York Times examines “Blogs in the Workplace”. I have to agree with the article’s sentiments—I could see the value in my company of employees having weblogs. I think every employee should have it, but I know that that’d never fly in my organization. At a minimum, those with regular announcements or content of interest should have them.
It becomes especially interesting when these corporate blogs are coupled with RSS aggregators. Doing so eliminates the hassle of having a ton of employees contributing content across the enterprise. Individuals within the company can subscribe to other employee’s feeds and ignore the other multitude of voices. People get to choose whether to pay attention or not. Email lists frequently don’t include people who should be included or include people whose responsibilities no longer require their inclusion. With blogs, these people can subscribe or unsubscribe at will.
The problem I see right now is with the software. MovableType’s commercial license is bizarre and unnecessarily restrictive. I’m not sure what the license fee is ($150? Maybe.) and I’m not sure what restrictions it suggests for an intranet network of blogs. Google’s Blogger is a product with which I’m intimately familiar, but there doesn’t seem to be a way to use it in the enterprise unless you’re Google. Then there’s Radio UserLand and Frontier: nope, I don’t think so.
In my younger days, I would have said this was a job for Bill the Coder to fill the space. Enh. Not anymore.